Sun has already said that they were going to try to come up with an "open source" license that still prohibits "fragmentation"; but that's a logical impossibility, since the ability to fork a project is an intrinsic part of any license that can be called "open source".
So, "Java will be open source in 30-60 days" may simply mean that Schwartz will attempt to redefine the meaning of the term "open source" within the next 30-60 days to fit the source license they are already using.
The article makes it sound like "nerds" should feel proud of this. I, for one, don't.
Simonyi condemned us to Hungarian notation and decades of writing code in C, C++, and COM, and is significantly responsible for the bloatware that is Microsoft Office. The negative impact of this, both for Microsoft products, and outside, has been enormous. Simonyi's most important contribution was his creation of the first WYSIWYG editor, while he was at Xerox.
Fortunately, after several decades of this, Microsoft is finally dumping Hungarian notation and moving away from C++. Let's hope they'll redesign Word and Excel from the ground up, too.
If one is writing applications, then it is very hard to beat C++, especially given the number of excellent cross-platform application frameworks
Just like junk food is the most popular food in the US, junk programming languages are the most popular languages: cheap, widely available, and many people are "happy" with them. They also cause analogous problems: software obesity and software heart attacks.
Basically, your entire rant is just reiterating standard stereotypes about languages and just shows that you yourself simply don't know any better. Sad.
That was then, this is now: (1) those people weren't leaving a democracy, (2) there were places to run to, and (3) a lot of the early immigrants didn't come out of some noble political or religious ideals, they were simply bankrupt or running away from the law.
"However when your executive team of four founders has generated a combined half a billion dollars in aggregate exit valuation in their prior gigs the bar gets raised considerably."
There are plenty of voice chat options, starting with Gnome Meeting/Ekiga. There are also plenty of VoIP-POTS gateway options and services you can get.
It's just that there are few/no options when you want to connect through proprietary chat services like Yahoo!, MSN, Google, etc. But that should perhaps not come as much of a surprise: not opening up their protocols is a policy decision. But it's not one that needs to affect you, since there are these other choices.
When someone talks about google talk's VoIP functionality then that person is talking about Jingle, which is a Jabber standard element.
Except that Jingle is only the connection setup part; you still need a compatible CODEC, and I think that's where the problem lies with an open source client for Google's VoIP service.
Unfortunately, it's completely unsubstantiated by facts or precedent.
(Note that while Microsoft called this a "promise", it's not the same as when, say, someone "promises" something as part of a business transaction. So case law about "promises" doesn't apply.)
Not only did both the submitter and the editor get wrong what the guy was actually planning on marketing, the whole thing was followed by an uninformed and irrelevant rant about watermarking. What's the problem, guys? Are mere dupes getting boring?
Running away is the wrong reaction. First of all, there is nowhere to go: many of the ills that afflict the US are exported sooner or later anyway. Secondly, if everybody who doesn't like the way things work, it will only get worse, first in the US, then for the rest of the world. You only need to look at the Palestinians and Israel to see how bad things can get: most sensible and moderate people have said "who needs this shit" and moved to the US or elsewhere.
Americans citizens have a lot of power to change things: don't throw yours away or make yourself politically irrelevant by running away. Oppose the religious nuts, the pork barrel dealers, the hate mongers, the zealots, the nationalists in public and in your personal life, and the hawks and participate in the political process.
The terms of the OSP "promises" seem fine: irrevocability, general applicability, etc.
The trouble is that it's a "promise". A "promise" on a web page is not the same thing as a legally binding commitment.
The proper thing to handle this would be for Microsoft to submit the specification to a standards body with a legally binding contract and steep penalties should Microsoft break the contract and take legal action against anybody implementing the specification.
I can't tell why they aren't doing this. It could be
* arrogance ("we're too big to have to make a binding commitment to anybody"),
* it could be ignorance ("if we promise, it ought to be good enough"),
* or it could be nefarious ("the OSP will be good enough for commercial implementors, but it's not FOSS compliant", "they think it's open and binding, but we have hidden this pitfalls in the fine print").
Any guesses?
Note that Microsoft's spec is not needed, since there are already alternatives.
The way most open source software gets created is by businesses that need to solve a problem but don't want to be in the software business. These people pay for and/or contribute to an open source project because making the project open source lowers their costs and risks. It is essential for them and the other contributors that there are no legal obligations to each other, other than to keep the software itself open and freely distributable.
What's wrong with Dean's proposal is that it makes the false assumption that there is income that's distributed, or that there should be a group of people with decision making power. In fact, most commercially developed open source software has no income that's directly derived from the software, and the ability to fork a project freely is an integral and essential part of open source development. If you take away either one of those properties, you end up with software that may ship under an "open source license", but it's not truly an open source project.
So they are "benign," which while a term of art, is very misleading to layfolks.
A benign growth in the brain can be a serious problem. But benign growths in most other places are, for the most part, benign given modern surgical techniques.
A tumor just plain sucks.
This is early research. A therapy that causes benign tumors is much more easily fixable than one that causes cancer. In particular, there is probably no DNA damage involved here.
In fact, this effect actually may turn out to be very useful for making stem cells work.
Secondly, these researchers went through great lengths to make these cells grow, without understanding exactly what they were doing. And they found afterwards that their method went a little overboard, or perhaps that they were using a bad stem cell line.
Of course, it would be nice if this particular method had worked, but it's not a "setback" in the sense of calling into question the value or safety of stem cells in general.
I prefer to reading which doesn't cause G-d to be commanding His people to break the Ten Commandments, personally.
Why? I mean, once you believe in a religion that justifies maiming and killing people you don't like, what difference does a little internal inconsistency make?
It does not break one of the Ten Commandments to kill your enemy in battle.
Well, thanks for clearing up that it's OK according to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to go out killing people, for example because your ruler decided he wanted more power or more land. I think we need to look no further in order to understand why the Middle East is such a cesspit of violence.
The GPL has held up very well legally over the years, not just in the US, but around the world. That in itself is an enormous success. Stallman is obsessed with getting these things right and reasoning them through.
In any case, if Linus or anybody else has legal concerns, now is the time to voice them. I guarantee you, Stallman will pay careful attention to valid legal concerns. Just be clear about what your concern is: if he has made up his mind on a policy matter, you aren't going to convince him to change his mind by dressing up policy issues as legal concerns.
Contrary to what people believe, Stallman's success isn't due to a fan club, it's due to his contributions. And the success of the GPLv2 isn't due to some ideological fervor, it's because it's a license that works well for many projects.
I have no idea whether GPLv3 will or will not work. Given Stallman's track record, I think there is a good chance it will. But people will accept or reject it based on its merit and utility, not its name or the names of its authors.
As for Forbes itself, there is no reason to believe that people at Forbes have any insight into what matters in the software industry. Their function in life is to report the facts as they are, not to make guesses about the future. Just look at the track record of those publications: they were years late to recognize even the existence of the Internet or open source software, and then they were quite critical of it and predicting gloom and doom (of course, they occasionally also gave opposing views--after all, that way, they can always say they were right).
Ignore the opinions of writers at magazines like Forbes; if these people knew what was going on, they wouldn't earn their living writing for Forbes.
The point is that the arrest shows that the US is more than willing to go through pretty extraordinary lengths to make foreigners subject to its legal system.
Even a big civil judgement against someone in the US is not to be taken lightly, in particular for someone in the computer business.
In fact, while the judge may not shut down the domain for the purpose of shutting down Spamhaus, he may yet transfer it as a "valuable asset".
If you watch non-geeks use it, you'll see that the OS X interface is no simpler than Windows, KDE, or Gnome. While it's simpler in some areas, it has its own pitfalls in others.
In terms of clutter, I suppose the main difference is that Macs don't ship with a lot of desktop icons pre-installed.
The judge ruled in favour of the plaintiff by default, but such a judgment is ineffective as US judgments do not apply to the UK.
Except, of course, if the people ever do any business in the US. And for anybody involved in computers, that's kind of hard to avoid. Viz the arrest of a transit passenger running an on-line gambling site legally, outside the US.
What is needed is to put block-level, hardware encryption into IDE/SATA controllers. In fact, it should probably simply be a standard part of the protocol; even a "no encryption" version should still use a password and XOR the disk with it so that all system software has to deal with this.
An additional problem is that the devices for which this feature is most important, mobile devices, make it most difficult to install it as an add-on. For a desktop, you can easily buy add-ons that provide hardware encryption, but for laptops, you're stuck with software.
As long as SATA encryption remains a specialty item, it's not going to be well supported and it's not going to be widely used. And as long as it's not full disk encryption, people are going to forget encrypting their stuff.
Of course, one reason why this isn't happening is because neither the government nor the manufacturers have any interest to make it happen. The government is worried about impeding law enforcement, and manufacturers don't like the added cost and complexity (however slight). Between those two, it's not going to happen and we'll have to live with sluggish software solutions.
Other systems have had these features for quite some time. Evidently, it's not the quality of the user interface that matters, but the brand name and marketing power behind it. Microsoft could be shipping the Windows 95 interface with a new theme again and people would buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun has already said that they were going to try to come up with an "open source" license that still prohibits "fragmentation"; but that's a logical impossibility, since the ability to fork a project is an intrinsic part of any license that can be called "open source".
So, "Java will be open source in 30-60 days" may simply mean that Schwartz will attempt to redefine the meaning of the term "open source" within the next 30-60 days to fit the source license they are already using.
The article makes it sound like "nerds" should feel proud of this. I, for one, don't.
Simonyi condemned us to Hungarian notation and decades of writing code in C, C++, and COM, and is significantly responsible for the bloatware that is Microsoft Office. The negative impact of this, both for Microsoft products, and outside, has been enormous. Simonyi's most important contribution was his creation of the first WYSIWYG editor, while he was at Xerox.
Fortunately, after several decades of this, Microsoft is finally dumping Hungarian notation and moving away from C++. Let's hope they'll redesign Word and Excel from the ground up, too.
If one is writing applications, then it is very hard to beat C++, especially given the number of excellent cross-platform application frameworks
Just like junk food is the most popular food in the US, junk programming languages are the most popular languages: cheap, widely available, and many people are "happy" with them. They also cause analogous problems: software obesity and software heart attacks.
Basically, your entire rant is just reiterating standard stereotypes about languages and just shows that you yourself simply don't know any better. Sad.
What about that Mayflower/King George thing?
That was then, this is now: (1) those people weren't leaving a democracy, (2) there were places to run to, and (3) a lot of the early immigrants didn't come out of some noble political or religious ideals, they were simply bankrupt or running away from the law.
"However when your executive team of four founders has generated a combined half a billion dollars in aggregate exit valuation in their prior gigs the bar gets raised considerably."
Which bar would that be? The state bar?
There are plenty of voice chat options, starting with Gnome Meeting/Ekiga. There are also plenty of VoIP-POTS gateway options and services you can get.
It's just that there are few/no options when you want to connect through proprietary chat services like Yahoo!, MSN, Google, etc. But that should perhaps not come as much of a surprise: not opening up their protocols is a policy decision. But it's not one that needs to affect you, since there are these other choices.
When someone talks about google talk's VoIP functionality then that person is talking about Jingle, which is a Jabber standard element.
Except that Jingle is only the connection setup part; you still need a compatible CODEC, and I think that's where the problem lies with an open source client for Google's VoIP service.
Unfortunately, it's completely unsubstantiated by facts or precedent.
(Note that while Microsoft called this a "promise", it's not the same as when, say, someone "promises" something as part of a business transaction. So case law about "promises" doesn't apply.)
Not only did both the submitter and the editor get wrong what the guy was actually planning on marketing, the whole thing was followed by an uninformed and irrelevant rant about watermarking. What's the problem, guys? Are mere dupes getting boring?
as opposed to, say,
What he is proposing may be worthwhile for freelancers, but it's not much of an open source business model.
Running away is the wrong reaction. First of all, there is nowhere to go: many of the ills that afflict the US are exported sooner or later anyway. Secondly, if everybody who doesn't like the way things work, it will only get worse, first in the US, then for the rest of the world. You only need to look at the Palestinians and Israel to see how bad things can get: most sensible and moderate people have said "who needs this shit" and moved to the US or elsewhere.
Americans citizens have a lot of power to change things: don't throw yours away or make yourself politically irrelevant by running away. Oppose the religious nuts, the pork barrel dealers, the hate mongers, the zealots, the nationalists in public and in your personal life, and the hawks and participate in the political process.
Not that I think OSP can be trusted, but it is interesting that the Microsoft Office XML specs apparently haven't even been released under OSP.
The terms of the OSP "promises" seem fine: irrevocability, general applicability, etc.
The trouble is that it's a "promise". A "promise" on a web page is not the same thing as a legally binding commitment.
The proper thing to handle this would be for Microsoft to submit the specification to a standards body with a legally binding contract and steep penalties should Microsoft break the contract and take legal action against anybody implementing the specification.
I can't tell why they aren't doing this. It could be
* arrogance ("we're too big to have to make a binding commitment to anybody"),
* it could be ignorance ("if we promise, it ought to be good enough"),
* or it could be nefarious ("the OSP will be good enough for commercial implementors, but it's not FOSS compliant", "they think it's open and binding, but we have hidden this pitfalls in the fine print").
Any guesses?
Note that Microsoft's spec is not needed, since there are already alternatives.
The way most open source software gets created is by businesses that need to solve a problem but don't want to be in the software business. These people pay for and/or contribute to an open source project because making the project open source lowers their costs and risks. It is essential for them and the other contributors that there are no legal obligations to each other, other than to keep the software itself open and freely distributable.
What's wrong with Dean's proposal is that it makes the false assumption that there is income that's distributed, or that there should be a group of people with decision making power. In fact, most commercially developed open source software has no income that's directly derived from the software, and the ability to fork a project freely is an integral and essential part of open source development. If you take away either one of those properties, you end up with software that may ship under an "open source license", but it's not truly an open source project.
So they are "benign," which while a term of art, is very misleading to layfolks.
A benign growth in the brain can be a serious problem. But benign growths in most other places are, for the most part, benign given modern surgical techniques.
A tumor just plain sucks.
This is early research. A therapy that causes benign tumors is much more easily fixable than one that causes cancer. In particular, there is probably no DNA damage involved here.
In fact, this effect actually may turn out to be very useful for making stem cells work.
First of all, they aren't cancerous.
Secondly, these researchers went through great lengths to make these cells grow, without understanding exactly what they were doing. And they found afterwards that their method went a little overboard, or perhaps that they were using a bad stem cell line.
Of course, it would be nice if this particular method had worked, but it's not a "setback" in the sense of calling into question the value or safety of stem cells in general.
I prefer to reading which doesn't cause G-d to be commanding His people to break the Ten Commandments, personally.
Why? I mean, once you believe in a religion that justifies maiming and killing people you don't like, what difference does a little internal inconsistency make?
It does not break one of the Ten Commandments to kill your enemy in battle.
Well, thanks for clearing up that it's OK according to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to go out killing people, for example because your ruler decided he wanted more power or more land. I think we need to look no further in order to understand why the Middle East is such a cesspit of violence.
The GPL has held up very well legally over the years, not just in the US, but around the world. That in itself is an enormous success. Stallman is obsessed with getting these things right and reasoning them through.
In any case, if Linus or anybody else has legal concerns, now is the time to voice them. I guarantee you, Stallman will pay careful attention to valid legal concerns. Just be clear about what your concern is: if he has made up his mind on a policy matter, you aren't going to convince him to change his mind by dressing up policy issues as legal concerns.
Contrary to what people believe, Stallman's success isn't due to a fan club, it's due to his contributions. And the success of the GPLv2 isn't due to some ideological fervor, it's because it's a license that works well for many projects.
I have no idea whether GPLv3 will or will not work. Given Stallman's track record, I think there is a good chance it will. But people will accept or reject it based on its merit and utility, not its name or the names of its authors.
As for Forbes itself, there is no reason to believe that people at Forbes have any insight into what matters in the software industry. Their function in life is to report the facts as they are, not to make guesses about the future. Just look at the track record of those publications: they were years late to recognize even the existence of the Internet or open source software, and then they were quite critical of it and predicting gloom and doom (of course, they occasionally also gave opposing views--after all, that way, they can always say they were right).
Ignore the opinions of writers at magazines like Forbes; if these people knew what was going on, they wouldn't earn their living writing for Forbes.
The point is that the arrest shows that the US is more than willing to go through pretty extraordinary lengths to make foreigners subject to its legal system.
Even a big civil judgement against someone in the US is not to be taken lightly, in particular for someone in the computer business.
In fact, while the judge may not shut down the domain for the purpose of shutting down Spamhaus, he may yet transfer it as a "valuable asset".
If you watch non-geeks use it, you'll see that the OS X interface is no simpler than Windows, KDE, or Gnome. While it's simpler in some areas, it has its own pitfalls in others.
In terms of clutter, I suppose the main difference is that Macs don't ship with a lot of desktop icons pre-installed.
The judge ruled in favour of the plaintiff by default, but such a judgment is ineffective as US judgments do not apply to the UK.
Except, of course, if the people ever do any business in the US. And for anybody involved in computers, that's kind of hard to avoid. Viz the arrest of a transit passenger running an on-line gambling site legally, outside the US.
What is needed is to put block-level, hardware encryption into IDE/SATA controllers. In fact, it should probably simply be a standard part of the protocol; even a "no encryption" version should still use a password and XOR the disk with it so that all system software has to deal with this.
An additional problem is that the devices for which this feature is most important, mobile devices, make it most difficult to install it as an add-on. For a desktop, you can easily buy add-ons that provide hardware encryption, but for laptops, you're stuck with software.
As long as SATA encryption remains a specialty item, it's not going to be well supported and it's not going to be widely used. And as long as it's not full disk encryption, people are going to forget encrypting their stuff.
Of course, one reason why this isn't happening is because neither the government nor the manufacturers have any interest to make it happen. The government is worried about impeding law enforcement, and manufacturers don't like the added cost and complexity (however slight). Between those two, it's not going to happen and we'll have to live with sluggish software solutions.
Other systems have had these features for quite some time. Evidently, it's not the quality of the user interface that matters, but the brand name and marketing power behind it. Microsoft could be shipping the Windows 95 interface with a new theme again and people would buy it.
from Janet Jackson's bustier.